Overseas students who have learned English as a second or foreign language (L2) form a prominent subgroup of research students in Australian universities. However, there is a paucity of research exploring the linguistic experiences of this population in connection with thesis examination and in comparison with first language users of English (L1).…

A large data set of L1 psycholinguistic norms (Balota "et al." 2007) was used to assess spoken L2 English lexical proficiency in cross-sectional and longitudinal learner corpora. Behavioral norms included lexical decision and word naming latencies (i.e. reaction times) and accuracies for 40,481 English words. A frequency measure was…

The purpose of this case study is twofold: it (1) explores multilingual raters' judgements regarding the accentedness and comprehensibility of second language speech and (2) examines how the raters' language backgrounds influence their judgements. In this study, six multilingual Singaporean raters judged the accentedness and comprehensibility of…

This study is a descriptive-qualitative study with an embedded-case study research design. The purpose of the study is to describe the quality of the translation on the accuracy in content, acceptability, and readability of translated text of English Idioms Errors Made by Jordanian EFL, Undergraduate Students abstract. The data of the research is…

The main purpose of this study is to explore and examine an early bilingual child whose use of English might be different on the account of the context the child uses English. Specifically, it was sought to find out if the child resorted to different phonological varieties as well as different interaction patterns while communicating. The relevant…

There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual…

Thesis defence examination (TDE) is an important event for students to complete to pursue their degree in many countries. Following Swales (1990, 2004) TDE can be considered as a class of communicative events, which has its own genre that has elements (or parts). Understanding the genre of an event could help students to perform competently. One…

This cross-sectional study used assessments developed by the Center for Applied Linguistics to examine the oral proficiency of 218 K-8 English-proficient students in 4 Spanish immersion programs. Following a comprehensive review of assessment results for English-proficient immersion learners, the article reports findings from statistical analyses.…

Computer technology made its way into writing instruction and assessment with spelling and grammar checkers decades ago, but more recently it has done so with automated essay evaluation (AEE) and diagnostic feedback. And although many programs and tools have been developed in the last decade, not enough research has been conducted to support or…

The increasing influence of sociocultural theories of learning on assessment practices in second language education necessitates an expansion of the knowledge base that teacher-assessors need to develop (what teachers need to know) and related changes in the processes of language teacher education (how they learn and develop it). Teacher assessors…

By the end of their studies, non-native speakers of English studying at English-medium universities have had several years of exposure to English in that setting. Do non-native students, particularly those enrolled in non-language related programs, show different levels of second language (L2) speaking ability in their final semester of studies…

This paper reports a case study of the nature and extent of progress in speaking skills made by a group of upper intermediate instructed learners, and also assessors' perceptions of that progress. Initial and final interview data were analysed using several measures of Grammatical and Lexical Complexity, Language Accuracy and Fluency. These…

Seventy-eight native English speakers rated the foreign-accented speech (FAS) of 24 international students enrolled in an Intensive English programme at a public university in Texas on degree of accent, comprehensibility and communicative ability. Variables considered to potentially impact listeners' ratings were the sex of the speaker, the first…